Wednesday, April 09, 2014

Do compare Jewish and Arab refugees

A Jewish refugee from the old city of Jerusalem in 1948

Just because the Palestinian refugee problem has not been solved and the Jewish refugee problem has, does not mean that a comparison should not be made and claims on both sides taken into account, argues Lyn Julius in this Huffington Post article:

A few weeks ago the Al-Jazeera Arabic channel carried a
report on starving Palestinian refugees in a Syrian camp. In a sequence
that must have slipped the editor's notice, an elderly man moaned in
desperation to the camera: "Take us to the Jews. They will feed us!"

In
that unguarded moment, two things were revealed: first -- Palestinian
refugees are being deprived of a humanitarian solution to their plight.
Second -- Arabs know full well that Israelis look after their own -- and
not only their own -- but try and help others.

Nowhere is the
contrast more stark than in the treatment of the two sets of refugees
which arose out of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. A fair proportion of the
711,000 Arab refugees were left to languish -- and now starve -- in
refugee camps as a longstanding reproach to Israel. Some 850,000 Jewish
refugees were ultimately absorbed and given full citizens' rights in
Israel and the West.
In the last month, the Canadian House of Commons decided to back a government committee recommendation to recognize the experience of Jewish refugees from Arab countries.

Yet Jewish voices, especially on the left, argue
that, simply because one problem has been solved and the other
hasn't, the Jewish refugees from Arab countries should not be tied to
the fate of Palestinian refugees.

Some like to see the Jewish
refugee issue as 'right-left' issue, an unnecessary impediment to a
peaceful settlement with the Palestinians. 'Right-wing Zionists', some
leftists claim, have long used the issue of Arab Jewish refugees to
'compete with' and 'derail' the claims of Palestinians.

It is
true that the 'right-wing' Netanyahu government has been the most
pro-active so far in raising the issue of Jewish refugees. But
'right-wingers' have been particularly reluctant to undermine the
classic narrative that these Jews were not refugees, but Zionists
returning to their ancestral homeland. For instance, the 'right-wing'
government under Menachem Begin did little to champion the rights of the
Mizrahi constituency that elected him.
In fact, Israeli governments of all stripes have been accused of neglecting the Jewish refugee issue.

However,
far from being the preserve of shadowy interest groups, the issue
attracted a rare consensus in Israeli politics when a 2010 Knesset law requiring compensation for Jewish refugees to be on the peace agenda was passed.
The call for recognition and compensation predates the current push by the Canadian government, and even the 2008 US Congressional resolution, demanding equal treatment for all refugees.

The legal underpinnings
of Jewish refugee rights are unassailable. All bilateral and
multilateral agreements signed by Israel use generic language about
refugees. UN Security Resolution 242, for instance, refers to a solution
to the 'refugee problem' -- carefully worded to cover both sets. On two
occasions, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) ruled that
Jews fleeing Arab states were bona fide refugees.

Advocates
for Jewish rights do not seek to delegitimize Palestinian claims. But
it is a feature of the prevailing discourse that Jewish refugee rights
are dismissed as an impediment to peace, denigrated or ignored, while
Arab rights -- including the much-vaunted 'right of return' -- are put
on a pedestal. Only Arab refugees may enjoy the exclusive support of the
UN agency UNWRA. Only Arab refugees may pass on their refugee status
from generation to generation so that, exceptionally amongst the world's
displaced peoples, five million people can now claim to be Palestinian
'refugees'.

For precisely these reasons Jewish and Arab refugees must be compared.
It
is beyond dispute that there were two sets of refugees in 1948. It is
not a suffering competition, but the rights of refugees carry no statute
of limitations. What about the human rights of these Jews who fled
violence and persecution with one suitcase ? Would they or their
descendants ratify a peace referendum that ignored their rights?

Recognizing
the narrative of 50 percent of the Israeli population who descend from
Jewish refugees from Arab and Muslim countries could well be the key to
reconciliation.

What have Jewish refugees got to do with the Palestinians, critics ask?
The current negotiations are between Israel and Palestine, not Israel
and its neighbors.
The conflict has linked Jewish refugees with
the Palestinians since the 1930s when the Palestinian Arab leadership
became complicit in victimizing Jews in Arab countries and dragged five
Arab states into the 1948 war against Israel. This war resulted in the
displacement of some 40,000 Jewish refugees from Jerusalem and the West
Bank, in addition to the 850,000 forced to leave Arab states.

More
proof of such a link is the fact that the Arab League plays an active
role in the present 'bilateral 'peace talks. Moreover, Arab states such
as Lebanon, Syria and Egypt hosting populations of Palestinian refugees
have an essential role to play in solving the refugee problem. A good
start would be for the Arab League to rescind the 1950s Law prohibiting
Palestinians from becoming citizens 'to avoid the dissolution of their
identity'*.

It is not Israel bombing and starving refugees to death
in Syria. The desperate pleas of an old man in a Syrian refugee camp
demand a humanitarian solution for all the citizens of that miserable
country.

To fail to call to account the Arab League for their
mistreatment of Palestinian refugees, however, would be to reward them
for their deliberate policy of political exploitation.

Equally, to ignore the human rights of Jewish refugees will not make them go away.

Arabs
and Israelis could only bring about an overall end to their conflict if
the rights of displaced refugees on all sides are recognized.

Is
it not right that both sides should have their claims taken into
account? What sort of reconciliation would be built on cock-eyed
justice?

*Ed's note: In 1959, the Arab League passed Resolution 1457: "The Arab countries will
not grant citizenship to applicants of Palestinian origin in order to
prevent their assimilation into the host countries."

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)